Jack the Insider

Democracy is a mad scientist, cackling away, laughing maniacally while the cathodes crackle and spark with animal electricity.

The results can be confounding. Sometimes functioning monsters are brought to life, sometimes they remain in repose but the formula invariably shows too much government is worse than none at all.

For the last 18 months, Americans have tapped into a particularly powerful lightning bolt. They had a couple of monsters to chose from. The Donald came up trumps, as we all know now. But away from the headline announcement, a whole lot of democracy went unreported or where it did get a mention it was of the postscript type.

From a raft of referendums posed in 35 states, nine states sought the people’s views on reforming laws relating to marijuana. Montana, Arizona, Maine, North Dakota and Florida all sought to create or amend laws permitting to the medical use of marijuana while California, Massachusetts and Nevada offered to go the whole skull bong and join the states of Colorado, Oregon and Washington in legalising marijuana.

Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States of America and nothing will ever be the same again.

After more than 18 months of rancid, ugly politics, Americans cued up to hand a tangerine demagogue the nuclear codes because they hated his opponent a bit more than they hated him.

Well, about half did. Around 52 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot. Counting continues but as of now Hillary Clinton is leading the popular vote and fewer votes have been cast for Trump than were cast for Mitt Romney in 2012. Many voters stayed at home. More than 50 million Americans did not register to vote.

The win came as the Democrats’ vaunted Blue Wall came down north of the Mason-Dixon Line and collapsed across the Great Lakes. Clinton’s superior ground game didn’t materialise. Pundits scratched their heads. Pollsters went into self-imposed exile.

Yesterday the Chicago Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years. Long suffering fans of the Western Bulldogs in the AFL and the Cronulla Sharks in the NRL will no doubt empathise but their agonising wait for a moment of elation and triumph is piffling compared to the privations of Chicago Cubs’ fans.

Arguably the Cubs’ biggest and longest suffering fan is actor and comedian, Bill Murray. Murray was born and raised in Wilmette, a northern suburb of Chicago and as with the tribalist affiliations in the AFL and NRL, he became a Cubs’ fan at birth and stuck with his team through the thick and the thin — mostly thin — over his 66 years.

Twitter went into a meltdown when they spotted Murray in the crowd in the seventh and final game just at the moment when the pennant was won. There was a look on his face of relief and utter joy.

Murray is more than a movie star in the US, more than just another celebrity. He is variously described as the most beloved man in the US and disturbingly, a living god. His interactions with the public invariably involve acts of gentle generosity.

It goes without saying Murray would win a popularity contest against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump hands down.

If you watch a lot of American news, you will have noticed a certain shrillness, a sense of excitement verging on hysteria. The mantra across all of the news networks is that presidential race is tightening and Trump is in better shape in polling than he was a week ago.

Can Trump really win?

The answer most certainly is yes.

On polling average over the last seven days, Trump’s vote has increased, his position in a number of swing states has improved and the polling trend is running his way not Clinton’s.

A number of forecasts continue to show Trump as having a one in ten chance of winning the election but the most reliable forecaster, Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com puts Trump’s chance at a touch under one in six.

The bookies (the miserable swine) are never going to go broke offering Trump at 4/1 but that is where he stands in the betting markets with Clinton at $1.15.

Earlier this week the Ecuadorean Government severed Australian hacktivist Julian Assange’s links with the world, rendering his laptop into a very expensive, beautifully designed and engineered clock.

The Ecuadorians did as any parent would with an unruly 12-year-old, calling an arbitrary time out off the net, interrupting Assange’s World of Warcraft game where he was well on the way to democratising Azeroth and establishing himself as the first troll among equals in Northrend and Pandaria.

Now Assange must while away the hours playing Hearts, Minesweeper and Solitaire.

It has been four years and four months since Assange entered the Ecuadorean embassy in London and sought political asylum. Some may see it as a clever way for millennials to solve the housing crisis while having their smashed avocados on toast and eating them, too

It’s been six days since the Trump tape was released and, for all the furore, sound and fury, the question remains: how damaging was it to Donald Trump’s attempt to win the US presidential election?

It was always likely to have some effect on how American voters regarded the GOP nominee because it is not a complicated type of he said/she said allegation or a complex scandal that involves a great deal of reading and research. The three-minute video features Trump’s own words. Anyone who clicks on the tape (and almost everyone has) watches it and quickly forms a judgment.

Yet, if there was going to be a significant campaign-ending backlash it’s not yet apparent.

A lot of the post-Trump-tape polling is set to roll out this weekend but what we have seen shows around a 2-point jump in Clinton’s polling average since the tape was released. She led by 4.5 points, now she leads by 6.5.

The US will have a new President, ending the Obama era after eight years where the Dow Jones has more than doubled, federal debt to GDP ratios have declined in each of the last seven years, GDP growth is spluttering along rather than firing at 1.4 per cent but better than the negative growth he inherited and unemployment is down from its double digit high in October 2009, sitting now at 4.9 per cent.

Almost hidden in the plethora of polls for the presidency, the Senate and the House, Obama’s approval ratings are stuck firmly in the positive. A Gallup poll published on Tuesday has Obama’s approval ratings at positive 11 per cent (54 to 43). When taking the average from reputable polling companies over the last month, the figure stands at a more modest five per cent.

Nevertheless, it is impressive. It is the sort of result that Messrs. Turnbull and Shorten would die for. George W. Bush’s approval ratings at the same time in the electoral cycle in 2008 were around negative 40 per cent.

Modesty may forbid the POTUS, but in the back of his mind he might wonder if he should pose the question to the American people, “Missing me already?”

Free from the rigours of parliamentary representation and sporting a hipster beard, Wyatt Roy appears to be writing his memoirs, his Roy’s Schoolboy Adventures in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Day One: Caught sight of those Islamic State blighters. The Kurds are all terrific fellows although they don’t speak English or play cricket. Got back in time to have toast for tea.

Stranger still was the response from NSW Premier Mike Baird to his abrupt fall from grace, featuring a slide in the polls that, if it continues apace, will place him somewhere on the popularity scale between a wonky card table and amoebic dysentery.

“But in the long term I hope what the people of NSW see is not just myself but a government that listens, that makes decisions that are not necessarily popular but are the right things to do in the long term [interests] of the state,” the Premier said.

Not a word of that sentence makes any sense. If Mike Baird really is listening, then he is ignoring what he hears and then goes merrily on his way doing as he pleases.

Journalist Steve Cannane has just released a book called Fair Game: The Untold Story of Scientology in Australia.

Steve’s a mate of mine. He has been working on the book for some time. I haven’t read it as yet but Steve and I chatted a number of times while he was doing the research and writing.

The release of the book got me to thinking about religion in Australia and its legal framework or the lack thereof. I’ve been keeping an eye on Scientology and various other cults in Australian for a long time. Their theological tenets, such as they are, are often laughably incoherent and fantastically structured. Scientology is no different.

This, in a nutshell, is what scientologists believe:

Around 75 million years ago, a dictator of the Galactic Confederacy, Xenu brought billions of aliens to Earth in a spaceship that oddly looked a lot like a DC-8, then stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living known as Thetans and continue to create chaos and havoc today.

Greens’ leader Senator Richard Di Natale has claimed his party’s walkout during Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech was a collective spontaneous reaction but the white board in his office tells a different story.

The Texta scrawl on the walkout gave the game away. Emblazoned on the white board was evidence of a discussion of the tactical wisdom of the walkout along with a recipe for an organic vegan dhal and a passable illustration of a dolphin.

When will politicians learn all it takes is a Chux and a blob of spit to make all that incriminating evidence go away forever? Leaving the job to the cleaners is the height of laziness and stupidity.

Ever since Ros Kelly came to grief over the Sports Rorts Affair in 1994, I’ve known Labor MPs who won’t walk into a room if there’s a white board in it or, when they do, walk straight out, believing white boards have eerie powers of audio recording and surveillance. But I digress.

Sino Sam Dastyari is back. Well, not yet but there seems little doubt his enforced move from the Labor front bench to the back bench is more yellow card than red one.

Labor leader, Bill Shorten has said as much and pundits, including Peta Credlin, believe Dastyari will be back on the front bench sooner rather than later.

The politician who gave us the taste sensation of the halal snack pack has been skewered by a donor kebab.

All right, that’s a really bad joke but politics is a funny game. If transgressors are merely sent to a sort of backbench purgatory, it makes one wonder why the scandals become so protracted. On my reading Dastyari had to go on Monday, if not earlier, yet it would take another 72 hours before he decided to pull the pin or indeed had it pulled for him.

My question is this: if Dastyari’s resignation amounts to little more than a bit of gardening leave, why delay it? Surely once the excreta hits the oscillator, it is time to exit, keep the kerfuffle down to a dull roar and move on quietly.

As Eric Idle cheerily sang, we should: “Pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space because there’s bugger all down here on Earth.”

The latter part of that verse was rudely confirmed this week. Whether it was ‘Shanghai Sam’ Dastyari’s mea culpa in the Senate for accepting the effusive generosity of the People’s Republic of China, Donald Trump’s coquettish embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin or the Turnbull Government losing the parliament for several hours late yesterday with the casual negligence of someone misplacing their car keys, we are left to wonder if the collective IQ of the planet is on a downhill slide that will only end when we hit somewhere on the scale between a macaque and a toaster oven.

In this ocean of human incompetence a trickle of hope emerged when some of the, shall we say, less prestigious media around the world went into click bait mode.

A signal had been detected by a radio telescope in a state-run Russian astronomical survey in southern Russia near the Georgian border. The radio telescope picked up a signal while scanning the Hercules constellation and a solar system far, far away (95 light years to be precise) bearing the name of its sun, HD164595.

The raft of polling data coming out of the US shows Donald Trump is well behind Hillary Clinton both in margin and trend and faces almost certain defeat in November.

Yesterday a poll was released by Quinnipac University showing Clinton’s lead over The Donald had hit double digits in what the director of the polling company described as “the first rumblings of a Hillary Clinton landslide”.

One poll does not a presidency make, of course, and on polling averages (polling figures taken from more than 20 polling companies), Clinton has a more modest lead of 6 points.

Trump’s strategists are pushing for a change of tactics and strategy but he appears unconvinced.

In 2016 an estimated 130,000 Australians will be diagnosed with cancer. Last Friday I became one of them when I was told I had cancer of the bladder.

Four days earlier I had a cystoscopy and the peanut-sized mutation cut out of me turned out to be a grade three carcinoma. Aggressive? A grade three is the soccer hooligan of carcinomas. It will cross the street to go you or more properly, gnaw away at a cellular level and left unchecked enter the vascular or endocrinal systems and wreak havoc wherever it goes.

My urologist, a lovely man and his nurse, a rather brilliant woman who is a cancer survivor of some 14 years, gave me the news. I was doing my best to appear stoic but the downcast look and ashen face gave the game away. I was in a state of shock of course. They gave me the best advice one can get in that situation. Take your time. Take some deep breaths. Leave your phone go to message bank and go tell your loved ones face to face.

Greyhound racing has now been banned in NSW when the state parliament passed the Greyhound Prohibition bill just before midnight on Wednesday.

At a superficial level it is just one more avenue of fun taken away by the nay-sayers.

For those who don’t enjoy a night at the dishies or even those that dislike the sport, the lesson is unrestrained governments with a distorted political will can strip anyone’s life and livelihood away with the stroke of a legislative pen.

That terrifying thought is soon to become a reality to the thousands of people in NSW involved in the industry – owner/trainers, breeders and people involved in ancillary or related work who count greyhound racing as their sole source of income. The means they have of making a living has not only been taken away but criminalised to boot.